Not since the Vestax VRX-2000 has an off the shelf record cutting lathe felt like a genuine shift in who gets to make a record. Teenage Engineering’s new APC-2, built with Viennese analogue specialists SUPERSENSE, is the first machine in more than two decades that looks capable of picking up where Vestax left off, and it arrives with rather more engineering behind it.
The context matters. Vinyl cutting has never really recovered from the industry’s decision, somewhere in the 1980s, that the format was finished. The lathes stopped being made. What survived were Neumann VMS70 and VMS80 units, plus a scattering of Scully and…
